


Battle Scars

by sabinelagrande



Category: DCU - Comicverse
Genre: Backstory, F/M, Injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-08-28
Updated: 2006-08-28
Packaged: 2017-10-04 10:51:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sabinelagrande/pseuds/sabinelagrande
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bruce, Selina, and the calms in between the storms.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Battle Scars

**Author's Note:**

> Post Hush, pre Infinite Crisis, but no real spoilers.

On the rare mornings they spend together, Selina makes him lie still as she traces his scars with her fingertips. She makes him tell all the attendant glories and shame. There are plenty. There's a tiny red one on his knee from where he fell as a child. The one on his foot makes him blush- Selina didn't know he could, so she makes him tell that one all the time- some snotty, drunken heiress stamped her stiletto right through Wayne's expensive loafer. Wayne's life hasn't left many marks on him; it's just something he passes through on his way to what he is.

Batman, however, is all banged to hell. She fingers the whip mark that almost encircles his upper arm with an odd sort of pride. There's a mark on his ribcage that has very nearly faded: the souvenir of his one and only attempt at sparring with Green Arrow. And it's his turn to be proud of the jagged cut on his stomach; Robin, the new one, did that. Those are bittersweet for her. All of Batman's life has been passed with capes. She's met them- she's tried to kill a fair few of them- but she doesn't know more than a handful of their identities. She doesn't know them like Batman does, and she's never going to; for as much as she's still Selina, suit or no, they'll only ever be Catwoman and Batman, and not a one of them will ever want to know otherwise.

But her favorite by far crosses the back of his left thigh. It's a horrible, nasty looking thing, but it's the story that gets her. It was his second or third week in the suit. It was raining, and he wasn't paying enough attention, and so he tripped and fell off the roof of a tenement onto a brutal piece of broken glass. It's an embarrassing story, and an oddly anticlimactic one, but it's human. When she passes her fingers over that scar, she feels like she is touching Bruce- not the cape or the playboy, not either of the masks he wears, but the thing that comes between, the man she thinks she loves. It's like he's really real in that moment.

So she tries to trace out every line, every bump, every scar, and memorize him, so that on the day that he doesn't come home again, she won't really be left alone.


End file.
